One of the biggest challenges of living as a nomad is relationships.

I’ve already written about some of the things we do to maintain our existing relationships. Phone calls, texts, visits home, and having friends and family come stay with us all help. But maintaining friendships is only part of the challenge.

The difficulty of making friends as an adult is already a cliche.  But how do you make new friends when you are moving every 3-6  months?  We’re still figuring that one out.

Church

One of the most common suggestions we’ve heard is to find a church.  Built in community, planned social events, and opportunities to give back.  There is a slight problem with that strategy for me. I’m not religious at all. 🙂

Still, Katie and I attended a Unitarian Universalist church while we were living in Omaha, and it wasn’t the worst experience.   We found a welcoming community, met a few interesting people, and Katie made at least one friend she has continued to stay in contact with since we left Nebraska.

That’s really what we’re looking for. We don’t necessarily need to build an entirely new social circle every time we move. Making one or two real connections in a place would be a success.

Volunteering

Another suggestion we hear frequently is volunteering. This one makes perfect sense in theory. Find an organization or cause you care about, contribute some time, and meet people while doing something useful.

We just haven’t had much luck actually making it happen yet. I’m still doing occasional paid consulting work, so when I’m not working, I’m not always eager to replace it with another obligation. We’re also only living in each location for a few months, and I want to have time to explore while we’re there.

Katie has a slightly different problem. Even when we’re based in one city, we still travel quite a bit. She doesn’t want to commit to volunteering every Tuesday morning, for example, if she knows we’re going to be gone half the Tuesdays we’re there.

I understand that. Volunteering may make more sense during a later stage of our lives when we’re staying in places longer and have more predictable schedules. For now, it hasn’t been the answer.

Finding Our People

The approach that probably appeals most to me is finding people who are interested in the same things we are. Sometimes that happens locally. In Omaha, I connected with some guys at the gym and the local ChooseFI financial independence group.  I met several people I’ve stayed in touch with since we left.

But I’m starting to wonder if being nomadic actually gives us another, better, option.

For most of human history, your social circle was largely determined by geography. You knew the people who lived near you, worked with you, went to church with you, or had kids in the same schools. Go back far enough and there was a pretty good chance you even found your spouse from among the people who grew up within a few miles of you.

Modern life has changed that. The internet makes it possible to find people anywhere who share your interests, values, hobbies, or even weird little obsessions (not that Katie and I have any of those, but still). Personally, I have always believed that it’s possible to maintain a relationship virtually. I’m less convinced that you can create a meaningful relationship that way. At some point, I think you need to spend some actual time together.

Being nomadic gives us an interesting advantage. We can go where those people are.

Earlier this year, Katie and I traveled to Colorado Springs to present at CampFI, where we spent a weekend surrounded by people interested in financial independence and life optimization. Right now, Katie is in Palm Springs for FinCon, combining time with her extended family with another opportunity to meet people from the digital creation and personal finance communities.

Those aren’t accidental relationships based on who happens to live next door. We’re deliberately putting ourselves in places where we’re likely to meet people with whom we already have something in common.

Maybe that’s one of the opportunities I hadn’t fully considered when we started living this way. Nomadic life can make it harder to build traditional local friendships, but mobility also expands the definition of “local.” We don’t necessarily have to find our people wherever we happen to be living.  Sometimes we can travel to find them. 🙂

Is It Worth the Effort?

This is the part I’m still wrestling with.

Making friends takes time. You have to find people, show up repeatedly, learn about each other, and gradually develop a relationship. That’s hard enough when you live somewhere permanently, but it’s even harder when you arrive knowing that you’ll probably be leaving in three or four months.

Sometimes I wonder whether it’s worth putting that much effort into building a local relationship when the clock is already ticking. So far, though, I think the answer is yes.

Some of the people we’ve met have become friends we’ve stayed in contact with after moving on. Others have simply been people we enjoyed spending time with for a few months. Even those shorter relationships have made our stays better. Local people have pointed us toward restaurants, hikes, stores, events, and places we never would have discovered on our own.

More importantly, they make a new city feel a little less like a place we’re visiting and a little more like a place where we’re actually living. I don’t think we’re ever going to recreate the kind of social network that comes from living (and working) in the same community for twenty years. And maybe that’s not the goal.

Perhaps the goal is simply to keep showing up. Try the church. Go to the meetup. Walk into the Toastmasters meeting where you don’t know anybody. Accept that some connections will last a few weeks and others might last for years.

We’re still figuring this part of nomadic life out. But if we’re going to live in a place for several months, I don’t want to spend the entire time surrounded only by strangers. Even temporary homes can use a few friends. 🙂